East Europe

Healthcare systems in Eastern Europe and Central Asia remain woefully unable to cope with HIV/AIDS as the region’s raging epidemic – the fastest growing in the world – takes on a new dimension, a senior UN official has told IPS.

A “virus” of restrictive abortion legislation is spreading from Eastern Europe, health experts and rights campaigners have said, amid Church pressure and misguided government attempts to stop falling birth rates.

A deeply-engrained culture of graft across Eastern Europe is destroying bonds between politicians and the people as populations lose faith in what they see as a self-serving elite “enriching” themselves at their expense, anti-corruption campaigners have said.

Monday’s resignation of Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas over a massive corruption scandal may well mark a new era of judicial independence in the Czech Republic and possibly the whole post-communist region.

Governments in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are being urged to end the institutionalisation of babies as more than 15,000 children a year in the region continue to be subjected to a practice experts say often leaves them physically and mentally scarred for life.